Problems reformatting drive and reinstalling Win XP PLEASE HELP!!

I have been having some major problems trying to reformat my hard drive and reinstalling WIN XP Pro. Hope someone can help!!

I have two harddrives in my PC a 20 gig and a 160 gig. Win XP was installed on my 20 gig hard drive and in trying to reformat this drive and reinstall windows I have encountered some major problems. Here's what happens:

1) I first changed the boot sequence to boot from the CD drive.

2) With the Win XP cd in the drive I rebooted the PC which brings me to the blue Win XP installed screen.

3) I select the C drive, delete the partition, and then create a new partition in the standard NTFS format.

4) Once the drive has been repartitioned I proceed in attempting to installed Windows, but I keep getting a screen that says that my drive is not in a Win XP compatable format and that I must go back, delete the partition, and create a new partition. Soooooo I do this and when I try to installed Win XP I just get the same message again!!

Now at first I thought that the problem might be a poor copy of Win XP, so I tried a different copy but that didn't work. I even tried using Win XP boot (floppy) disks and booting from my A drive, but that didn't work. So then somebody told me that the drive might be corrupt, so I went out and bought a new HD (120 gig) and tried again only to have the same error!!! What gives!!

Oh, one more thing I have the drive that I am installing XP onto set at Master and my secondary drive set at Slave. I don't think this is the problem, but just as an FYI.

Is there anything that I can do?? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Did it work before ? Did it work whiole the 130G was already in as slave. In other words, what have you actually DONE to upset a working system apart from reformatting? Maybe you bent a pin on the cable connection.

Could be motherboard failure. Eliminate your motherboard by taking HD, cable and CD to another PC and trying to install. if it works, you might need a new motherboard. If it doesnt, elimiate the CD, cable and HD by replacing each in turn.

Take out one of the drive and try to install one this time, see if it work.

Try use bootdisk (win98 bootdisk "www.bootdisk.com") if all failed.
Execute FDISK and delete any partitions that do exists then do a full format drive (re-partitions if needed) and try reinstall window once again.